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American Express has recently linked many different media strands together, including live music, online streaming, social video and social media, to create Unstaged, a channel that caters for an online, music hungry audience while offering effective brand promotion.

Let’s take a look at the ways American Express Unstaged brings the offline, online with storytelling.

On its Unstage YouTube landing page, American Express makes clear its narrative intention for the user.

The copy is full of signifiers: “…Create unexpected musical journeys” and “From studio to stage… Unstaged creates unforgettable stories…”

How does American Express Unstaged take viewers on these “unexpected musical journeys”?

Firstly, American Express hasn’t been shy of hiring some incredible, and indeed surprising, filmmaking talent to direct the live shows. David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, Werner Herzog, Spike Lee.

These are brilliant and thoroughly unpredictable directors, and are publicised as much as the bands. Not faceless Hollywood drones, but auteurs who the audience know will do something compltely out of the norm.

Teaming them up with against-type bands is also an interesting gambit. Werner Herzog and The Killers anyone? It’s a weird combination but it’s the first time I’ve ever been tempted to watch a Killers performance.

David Lynch and Duran Duran? I’m definitely going to watch that.

The creativity extends beyond the live stage. Prior to Vampire Weekend’s streamed performance at the Roseland Ballroom, Steve Buscemi created a series of sketches with the band, uploaded onto the Unstaged YouTube channel over the course of a couple of weeks.

Episode five was also used as promo video for Vampire Weekend’s single ‘Step’.

This is a cross-promotional masterpiece. Not only giving publicity to American Express, but also the live concert due to be streamed in a few days, and Vampire Weekend’s new album.

Later this year, Unstaged followed the same format with Kings of Leon and Portlandia’s Fred Armisen.

This series is actually a lot funnier than the Buscemi/Vampire Weekend one. I particularly like Caleb Followill’s admission that ‘none of us are very good individually’.

Using a six episode narrative structure, a great deal of humour, an established and talented artists’ own music, a leftfield director, and all of it culminating in a 90 minute long streaming concert, American Express Unstaged has created an impressive package for reinvigorating live music by giving it a new and entertaining online home.

Cross platform interactivity

There have been 13 gigs so far in the last two years, with Kings of Leon being the latest event in August 2013.

The shows themselves can be streamed on multiple platforms: via YouTube and Vevo on desktop, YouTube’s iOS and Android apps and mobile sites, VEVO’s apps for iPhone and iPad, Xbox 360 and on the American Express Channel available through an app on LG TVs.

In terms of interaction, viewers can choose their own view of the concert, tweet the bands directly, vote for the encore songs and engage with other users.

In conclusion…

This is a powerful and deeply immersive platform, and one that seems to have complete backing from the artists involved. Terry Gilliam states:

Maybe the best way for brands to approach clients is to work with artists they like. Like patrons of art back in the 19th century. There’s a new world developing.

Arcade Fire’s management has also stated

The days of the label doing the marketing for you are over. The band comes up with the ideas. Labels just distribute. We would work with Amex again, though.

Perhaps it helps that the brand has taken a backseat within this context. It’s enough for American Express to finance Unstaged and put its name on it.

By not pushing the hard sell and letting the artists get on with things in a trustful manner, it allows other decent bands and directors to get involved; ones that don’t normally align themselves with brands, and therefore bringing quality artists to a larger audience through online channels.

Recommended

UGC within the voucher code space has been a contentious issue for quite some time prompting many a discussion at the IAB Affiliate Marketing Council and earning itself a reference in the Voucher Code of Conduct.

However, the affiliate industry to date has struggled to find any real consensus on how this area should be managed and regulated, and as a result one of the key players in the market has embarked on its own version of UGC within voucher codes with a ‘social codes’ platform.

Brands are now required to work out how best to communicate across a growing number of channels ranging from traditional media to digital environments, all the while maintaining a consistent message and identity.

To find out how marketers are adapting to deal with the change in the way that people engage with media channels, Econsultancy and Mediaocean have today published a new report entitled Managing Media Convergence.

The report is based on a survey of 124 agencies as well as in-depth interviews with 18 executives from agencies and brands, all with significant interest and experience in managing media.

Now the time has come to quit these VoD services because it seems there really is such thing as too much choice… plus I’m not made of money… and there’s only so many hours in a day. I do have a job you know!

Companies are pouring billions of dollars a year into social media and influencer marketing campaigns, many of which target consumers on Facebook-owned Instagram, in an effort to parlay social engagement into sales.